African intellectuals should re-think their position and role on the local and international thought arenas. The question is whether academics are aware of themselves as African, European, or Asian. How does the global trend affect African nationals and intellectuals? What African hopes and prospects still remain to be nurtured into fruition as the product of the African renaissance? What is the future for Africa and its people?

Much has been written on how low literacy levels contribute immensely to political apathy and negligence to participate in the development process. The academic is always accused of not doing enough to raise people’s political and social consciousness. The question that is seldom asked, however, is how much the African academic is actively engaged in contributing to the development process, particularly in helping the government of the day to resolve pressing social, political, cultural, and economic issues. The question is necessary since academics tend towards polarization where they monopolize and minimize their effort, hoard their knowledge and expertise, and/or use their skills against the commonwealth or nation state.

A very authoritative scholar on development theories, Jan Black in Development in Theory and Practice: Paradigms and Paradoxes (1999) makes very startling revelations about academics in both the “First” and “Third World.” He says that Third World elites, pursuing class interests as well as individual economic and political interests, often adopt First World perspectives on development, and that many scholars from the First World choose to identify with non-elites of the Third World.

The question is: What are the academics doing about the mismatch between national and personal interests? Also, if First World development scholars and practitioners choose to work with non-elites who invariably are unskilled and untutored in development concepts and policy issues, what would that mean for local academics as well as the local job situations that would be under consideration? The idea here is that development theories are complex and demand some sophistication (if not learned) in decoding and analysing IMF and World Bank economic theories of structural adjustment and balance of payment. As Black observes, development specialists are loath to acknowledge the traces of arrogance in the operations of their own agencies but are highly sensitive to the insensitivities of other agencies. Several administrators and field agents have pointed out the tendency of developmentalists to speak to peasants in professional jargon they can not understand or to speak down to them, as if they were children. 

As things would be, who would be better placed to relate more meaningfully to the language and expressive meanings and concept formations of the peasant nationals than their own national elites? However, if “First World” developmentalists make it their habit to by-pass the local experts and deal directly with the peasants what is expected from such projects? The First World practitioners are overstepping their mandate by not engaging enlightened intellect in the formulation and resolution of policy and developmental issues. Third World academics allow them free play on issues that could (and have in many instances) inflicted political, social, and cultural doom to the concerned nations. The control of individual projects by bureaucrats and consultants, especially foreign ones, may result in completed projects, but it is not likely to result in the enhancement of local capacity. An experience of Chris Searles in Swaziland in the 1970s highlights the problem. The Mbabane Urban Extension, to which he was assigned, involved physical and policy planning for a squatter slum… The expatriate-dominated project team included a U.S. architect, a South African planning firm, and a British-based multinational engineering firm. The team failed utterly to adjust plans and procedures to the local context… Not only did the project fail to build local capacity, but it failed even to produce a usable product. The $30,000 plan was simply discarded.

The primary concern of the African academic/intellectual is to remain vigilant when watching over and deciding on policy issues affecting the lives and well being of their fellow country people. Africa is known for her spirit of collectivity and it is that togetherness, that mutual collective concern that should be re-shaping Africa’s new found geist. Perhaps we need to re-think the African scholarship and institute a new paradigm that will define the meanings of academic freedom in the context of both the social and individual needs and purposes of the African nation states. The character and spirit of the African renaissance should be more focussed to the functional and problem solving philosophical orientations.